fothrowaway

My daily bicycle commute as a civilian resident of The Hague takes me past the OPCW (and the Marriott hotel next door where, rather infamously, a pair of Russian spies were picked up in the process of hacking the OPCW's wifi network in 2018 - see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/04/how-russian-sp...), which itself is across the street from the official state residence of the Minister-President of the Netherlands (though the current, demissionary-though-apparently-impossible-to-remove PM, Mark Rutte, prefers to live elsewhere.) Further down the block on my way to my kids' school are the World Forum, Europol, Eurojust, the not-at-all-sinister-sounding International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals aka the "Mechanism" which used to be the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the embassies of China, Israel, Venezuela, the Philippines, and Sweden. Sometimes I take a different route back home which takes me past the Russian diplomatic compound among others.

Look, I'm pretty sure I'm well known to a whole bunch of security services (hi y'all!) just by virtue of my daily commute. But here's the deal - what matters is how this can be used against me, or not. There's no realistic scenario in which I'm going to come to grief from the various security apparatus I happen to pass each day.

No, what matters much, much more than whether my face and habits of movement are known to various state organs (admittedly: given that I live in the Netherlands where the rule of law is still a thing) is the degree to which I can come to grief in my personal life from shitty, sloppy private mass surveillance.

Which, fortunately, is relatively constrained here. My health insurance premium isn't going to inexplicably go up (or, for that matter, my coverage denied) because someone who looks like me (who may not be me, but I have no access to the data or ability to appeal) is living an unhealthy life in public. No, the rates are fixed for everyone, and insurers don't get to cherry-pick. While I wouldn't mind an health insurance discount for cycling instead of driving a car those 10km/day, in general I'm satisfied with the regulatory regime here in a way that I very very much wasn't when I lived in the US. Nor would I be denied a mortgage here (or charged a higher rate) based on my alleged movements in meatspace or cyberspace. Insurers and banks just aren't allowed - with meaningful regulatory oversight - to incorporate these factors into underwriting products that most people consume. (Life insurance is a different story, but also not something most people in NL purchase.)

tl;dr: it's not surveillance per se that matters, it's the consequences attached. Even if you have the right to know how surveillance data affect your ability to live your life (and to appeal), those rights are useless to anyone who lacks the time and knowledge to go chasing them. Far better as a society to, up front, say "nope, sorry, everyone needs health insurance/access to basic financial products like mortgages on primary residences/etc" and limit the scope of discrimination. Because tech gonna tech, and that's impossible to stop over the long term.